


Unloved and Loved

by Cityoffayz



Category: Gone Series - Michael Grant
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Unplanned Pregnancy, post PLAGUE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:47:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23973250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cityoffayz/pseuds/Cityoffayz
Summary: 'Your children are the greatest gift life will give you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility it will place in your hands.'In which Caine struggles to come to terms with being a father, and needs help making the right decision.
Relationships: Diana Ladris/Caine Soren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	Unloved and Loved

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking up a post plague AU this week, and got inspired to write this!  
> Featuring best underused friendship, Brianna and Caine.

Caine was panicking.  
He prided himself on the fact that nothing could ever phase him, not any of the shit that went down during the Fayz. He always managed to be able to calm himself, think things through, and make the right decision. Well, the right decision for him. But now, he had seen something surreal. Something that made him panic beyond reason.  
What had truly shaken him was the baby in Diana’s arms. His baby. His daughter.  
He’d managed to be able to keep it together, for a little while. Long enough for both Diana and the baby to go to sleep. Caine had tried to, but he couldn’t stop thinking. And then he took one look at the baby, sleeping, curled up in the heavy duty hospital blanket, and Caine had ran.  
It was the middle of the night, the hospital was asleep. Caine was walking with no direction, finding himself going from the maternity ward back on the ward where all the Fayz kids were. He had nowhere to go, that small hospital room at the far end of the corridor had become his new home. Caine couldn’t leave, he knew that the hospital was guarded by a small militia. But he couldn’t be down there. It wasn’t right.  
Caine wanted out. 

*

Brianna couldn’t sleep.  
The hospital was ridiculously warm and stuffy, and the window in her room was jammed, so there was no way of getting fresh air. She was getting very tired of staying here. Congress couldn’t decide what the hell to do with the collection of broken and battered children that had survived the Fayz, they hadn’t been prepared for the dome to come down, no one had been. One minute Brianna was fighting the bugs, the next minutes she had been shoved in the back of an ambulance. Over the next few days she had been filled in on what had happened; Little Pete had died, and the dome had come down. The nightmare had finally ended. The kids, the survivors, were too weak to go back home, and too dangerous to be left unsupervised. So in the meantime they had shoved them all onto a hospital ward, guarded at all times. Brianna was luckier than most, she had a private room. But there was no TV, no internet. She had never liked reading. Brianna longed to get back outside, to stretch her legs and just run. Then she remembered she no longer had her powers, she was back to being a boring kid.  
Well, not boring, she was still The Breeze.  
She eventually gave in the attempt of sleeping, grabbed her water bottle and left the room. Hopefully some cold water might be able to fight the stifling temperature. Thankfully there was a water fountain on the ward, just around the corner from her room. As long as she was silent, she didn’t need to disturb any of her friends or, even worse, one of the annoying guards on her trip to the water fountain.  
What Brianna didn’t expect was for someone to already be there.  
There, standing by the water fountain, was the last person she ever wanted to see, Caine Soren.  
Sam had come round to say Diana had gone into labour that afternoon, and no one had heard anything since. They had made bets on the gender of the baby (Brianna guessed girl), and waited for any news, and heard nothing. And now Caine was here, alone, looking like an absolute wreck.  
She had never seen him show real emotions before. She had seen that smug smile too many times, but any genuine happiness, sadness, feelings? Nope.  
And now Caine Soren was crumpled against the wall, with a bright red face and tears in his eyes, obviously on the verge of a mental breakdown.

“Can I get by?” Brianna nodded towards the water fountain. Caine moved wordlessly, chewing his thumbnail.  
Brianna set up her water bottle, and waited for it to fill. Too slowly. She couldn’t handle silence at the best of times, but this was agony.  
“Did she have the kid?”  
“Yep” Caine said flatly. “Girl”  
She was right, and now Astrid owed her a pack of red vines.  
“How are they?” Brianna asked awkwardly, willing her water bottle to fill up faster.  
“She-they, they’re fine” Caine went to chew his thumbnail, only to find it bitten to the quick and bleeding.  
“What’s wrong then? You look like you’ve been hit by a truck” look, if Brianna was going to engage in conversation with Caine, she wasn’t going to tiptoe around him. Besides, he really did look like crap.  
“It’s not-“ Caine stopped, and tried to start again, and find the right words.  
He’d been trying for so long to act as if he was okay with this. He hadn’t let the mask slip in front of Diana once, he knew she was barely coping and his troubles might push her over the edge.  
Caine had pushed the feelings back, and back, until he barely even knew what he was thinking anymore.  
“It’s not right, okay? I mean. Fuck, do I really look like father material?”  
“No, to me you still look like the piece of shit that made me and my friends life hell for months on end”  
“Exactly!” Brianna was so surprised that he agreed with her, she didn’t even manage to line up another quippy remark.  
“That’s not me, right? Barely a boyfriend, but a father?” Caine was near shouting, waving his hands in some kind of frenzy. If he still had his powers, Brianna would’ve been thrown into a wall. “I don’t want children, I’ve never wanted children. I don’t like children. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m supposed to drop my entire life to devote myself to my offspring, my daughter, just because I slept with someone? Diana wanted to keep it, but I didn’t. So why should I have to play dad all of a sudden? I don’t-“  
“Look, I don’t know what you think this is, but take the self pity somewhere else, okay?” Brianna made to walk away, but stopped when she saw the look on his face.  
Was she really feeling bad about being rude to Caine?  
Maybe it was just because he looked so pathetic.  
Brianna was no saint, but she’ll be damned if someone tried to say she wasn’t a good person.  
“Stop freaking out, just breathe for Christ’s sake” She grabbed his arm, forcing him to sit down on the floor opposite her.  
“Look, what is it that you want to do? You don’t want to be a father? You want to abandon Diana and you kid?”  
“Abandon is a pretty harsh word-“  
“But it’s the one I’m gonna use, cause it’s true” Brianna took a drink of water, trying to think this through. She wasn’t really good at the whole advice thing, she usually let Dekka or Sam handle all the pep talks and meaningful advice.  
If Dekka was here, what would she say?  
She’d say-  
“Hypocrite”  
“What?”  
“You are a hypocrite Caine” Brianna said slowly, a smile creeping onto her face. “Your entire thing is about how you feel abandoned by your birth mother. You more than most people know what it’s like for a parent not to care, and yet you want to leave you daughter? You want to not care? You know how it feels, and what it makes you do. And yet you are considering abandoning your daughter just like Connie did with you? You are a fucking hypocrite Caine”  
He didn’t move once when she was speaking, he barely blinked. For the first time in this conversation, the mask had come back on, and Caine was unreadable again.  
“So” Caine said, so quietly Brianna barely caught it. “What should I do?”  
Brianna was going to have to drag him to the conclusion, wasn’t she?  
“If i were you, I’d go back, and try and be the best dad I can be. You can’t be perfect, but you can make the effort to be”  
Caine stood up so suddenly Brianna almost upset her water.  
“Right” he had made it two paces before spinning back around. “T-thanks. I guess”  
Brianna smiled to herself as he walked away.  
“Don’t mention it”

*

The room was pitch black when Caine finally made it back. Diana was still fast asleep, so he moved silently, he didn’t want to wake her. She had been through hell today. He had tried to help, which thankfully was easy cause there really wasn’t a lot for him to do. All Caine had to do was offer his hand for her to squeeze and don’t talk too much. Just spout banal phrases of encouragement, keep it positive. That was interesting, because he wasn’t a positive person and the miracle of childbirth is a horror show. Women always insisted that childbirth was the worst pain a person could experience, but Caine wasn’t sure he had believed it. Not until Diana, the inscrutable and unreadable Diana had spent over six hours sweating, screaming and crying giving birth to their child, did Caine believe childbirth was hell. 

A soft whimpering was coming from the crib at the foot of Diana’s bed. The baby was awake. Caine took a deep breath and went to pick her up. It took a couple of shifts until he found the right position, and the baby was laying carefully against his shoulder.  
Even as tiny as she was, he could see the similarities on her face.  
She had his nose.  
Life had taken the most bizarre turn over the past year or so. Caine should’ve been preparing for the SAT’s, and worrying about things like college, his career and the future.  
Now he was here.  
But at the end of the day, there were far worse places to be, time in the Fayz proved that. He loved Diana, even if he hadn’t made himself admit it aloud yet. And now they had a daughter together. 

She had his nose. She had a smattering of dark hair on her head, the exact shade of Diana’s. She was paler than Diana, but still darker than him. She had ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes.  
Nothing the Fayz could throw at him could ever be so terrifying as the thought that this small human being was now his responsibility.  
But she was his responsibility. And maybe he did want to run away from that. Caine ran away from any sort of emotional vulnerability. If he had his way, he wouldn’t confront any of those feelings until he absolutely had to.  
But Caine didn’t have time for that. Because the baby was here now, and she needed to be loved and cared for. She couldn’t wait until Caine wanted to become a better person.  
So he was going to have to force himself. He was going to do this. Because he had spent the better part of a year wondering what he did to be discarded. He kept thinking about Connie, why she had looked at him, and hadn’t wanted him. It made him feel worthless. Caine hated it.  
She was never going to feel like that. Not if he can help it. No child should ever feel unloved or unwanted.  
‘’Maybe I can’t be a perfect dad’ Caine thought ‘but I can damn well try’.


End file.
